Quotes from George Bishop

The most mundane details of life are not mundane if they're done with someone else in mind. When you're in love, everything's important.

You know the kind of place: dirt roads, dirt yards, dirt gardens. Frustration and anger and sadness turned inward to become poverty.

She was so pretty, so elegant, it made me lonely just to look at her.

Freshman year, kissing and deep French kissing. Then sophomore year, I'd want to be making out with her. By sixteen we should be having oral sex, and by seventeen or eighteen, full frontal sex. Of course, it could go faster than that, but basically, he said, that was the standard progression. Before I finished high school, I should be having full frontal sex with her.

And why, oh why, I wondered, had he named me after himself? What kind of a father would do that to his son? What could he have been thinking? Was it an excess of pride? Or was it, as my sister had once theorized, just the opposite, a deep-seated sense of inferiority that made our father want to double himself?

For better or worse, I was my father's son, and I intuited, however unclearly, that my life was inextricably bound up with his. I was who I was because of him. His blood was in my blood, his history was my history. Even my future, the person I might one day become, depended on him, because everything he'd ever seen or done or thought or felt flowed up through him and into me.

The past never leaves you. You carry it around with you for as long as you live, like a pale, stubborn worm lodged there in your gut, keeping you up at night.

My father wasn't inclined to talk much about his past, and when he did—when I pressed him for details and he began to reminisce about his youth—he became so dull and long-winded that I soon regretted ever asking him anything.

He owned one pair of shiny black shoes that he resoled every two years for twenty years.

The waterway between our houses marked a boundary as clear as the one between white and black, rich and poor. It was just like at the school yard, only with adults: the Martellos had their circle, my parents had theirs, and the two were never meant to overlap.

But then you met Dad in the drugstore." She laughed—not a happy laugh, exactly, but one you might use in talking about an embarrassing incident from your past.

I just want to know who made the rule that you had to stop having fun once you got married.

Lately, I'd begun to suspect that this world of sex was even bigger and more pervasive than I could imagine. It might've been everywhere; it was going on all the time, all around me, like a parallel life that was being played out, half seen, on the other side of a thin curtain.

This was another thing they failed to teach you at school: what to say, what to do when you were standing side by side with a beautiful girl.

Through these observations I began to see her as less of a goddess and more of a person. She was funny, thoughtful, at times awkward. She was, in fact, someone not so different from me: a human being trapped inside a teenager's body, waiting for the world to begin.

That life wouldn't get any easier as I got older. If anything, it would only get harder as I grew up to the realization, as he apparently had, that all our beliefs were built on a flimsy scaffolding of stories, and that happiness was nothing but a wish and love was only a lie.

This, I understood in a flash, was why people liked to dance. It made you forget who you were and at the same time remember who you were always meant to be.

I didn't say who the Sun was; I was careful not to even look in her direction. But I thought that it must've been obvious to anyone with eyes to see: there she was in the front row, blazing.

Gorgeous. Gorgeous home," my mother had said. Seeing it myself, I understood why she liked visiting here so much, and why she always seemed so disappointed when she returned home to ours. It was obvious, wasn't it? Who wouldn't have wanted to trade their lives for this dream?

He was strong and unforgiving, a bully, and I saw that he would be that way for the rest of his life; and for this same reason I suspected that he would always be successful in whatever he did, and I despised and feared him for that.

That was the problem with expectations: they were good only as long as they lasted. Better not to expect anything at all. Better to join the cold-blooded, big-eyed creatures slithering in the mud at the bottom of the canal, animals that didn't have to worry about love and hope and expectation. Because as soon as you grew two legs and learned to walk upright, you were pretty much doomed to a lifetime of disappointments.

Her eyes changed and her face went soft. I saw something there that I'd seen that afternoon in the planetarium, a certain tenderness tinged with sorrow—a depth of feeling that seemed at odds with her youth and beauty, but that also seemed to mirror my own feelings, feelings I hardly recognized in myself until I saw them in her.

I'd never thought it was possible for adults, parents like mine and Gabriella's, to fall in and out of love like teenagers, at least not in any world that I knew. But what if they could? Then what?

This was yet another one of those things that school failed to prepare you for: how to deal with the unpredictable behavior of real people in the real world.